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Mar 13, 2012

Using Filters to Sharpen and Soften

How to Create a Crisp Look

In this episode I cover the best ways to Sharpen your images for the Web using the Unsharp Mask and High Pass Filter in different Blend Modes. These effects can also be used to Soften an image creating a focal point. The best way to know how much or little to add depends on the resolution, so its always a good idea to edit them based on the Size they will be viewed later.

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do 2 copy of the layer. group them.
change the group layer from passthrough to overlay
now change the top layer to vivid light and change it to smart layer
then you ad surface blure to the layer,
the radius dose the same. and the threshold is the value.

the benfits is that you get less halo when sharping.
downfall, its very slow way. and it will eat all that memory you have, muhaahaha!!

Canon cameras…factory saturation levels for standard picture style is oversaturated. They do this because consumers want bright colorful images. Create a User Defined picture style with standard as base but knock the saturation level down one point on the graph. The sharpening is solved by shooting with L Series lenses….shutter speed always double the focal length….use a lightmeter and set a CWB…and in the image that was shown…a reflector on camera right would fill the right side of the model so it doesn’t appear so harsh and dark.

That was a good tutorial, I always used high-pass with overlay or soft light blend modes, but didn’t realize it effected my colors. I will remember to desaturate next time and see what difference it makes.

Also, I like the cheesy inverted high-pass look 🙂 It’s kind of like using a diffusion filter on your lens.

“The name comes from the original photographic procedure used to increase the apparent sharpness of a photograph on film. First the original negative was copied and turned into a positive (In a negative, black is white and white is black. In a positive, it’s the other way around.). During the copy, the positive was intentionally blurred. This is where “unsharp” comes from. Then the positive and negative were put in contact and exposed to light again. The blurry portion of the positive cancelled out (masked) the blurry portion of the negative.”